a cat instead of a man. One cat's soul was all
"the Other One" got for his trouble.
The trickle in the mountain meadow and
the spout in the stable seemed far away. Here
the Loire flowed forcefully, a quarter of a mile
wide. Already it was well into the legendary
Val de Loire, the region of royal residence,
whose full flowering would appear just ahead
at Blois, and beyond.
At first glance the famous Chateau of Blois
seems unremarkable. It is not nearly so large
as the imagination would make it. It has no
unity. Its wings are of different ages, different
styles, and different materials, seeming to ig
nore each other's existence.
Yet in its detail and in its separate parts the
Chateau of Blois is beautiful and impressive,
even though it is richer in its past than in its
present. And it is the perfect place to encoun
ter the shades of the Val's great men and to
begin an exploration of their special and in
dividual creations.
I entered Blois as part of a large, noisy, and
cosmopolitan tour group. It included a dozen
different nationalities plus perhaps a hundred
happy, supercharged little Italian schoolgirls
who, with their high speed and low center of
gravity, outmaneuvered everyone in the door
ways and stairways.
We ambled dutifully from wing to wing,
from epoch to epoch: through the great hall
of the 13th-century Counts of Blois; the red
brick Gothic gallery of the poet Charles of
Orleans, who, in his 71st year, fathered Louis
XII; the late Gothic additions of Louis XII;
the white limestone Renaissance elegance
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